In the iconography of the high sky courts of the First Heaven, immortals were depicted as ghostly beings whose feet never touched the profane dirt of the earth.
They rode upon clouds of spun jade. They wore slippers sewn from golden silk that had never known the mud of a furrow or the slime of a riverbank. Their skin was smooth as unworked alabaster, untouched by the blistering kiss of salt water or the coarse abrasions of jagged reef-stone. They floated six inches above reality, believing that purity was achieved by severing all contact with the ground, drifting like gold-trimmed dust through palaces of perfumed cedar while common mortals laboured in the ditches.
Yet here, at twenty-six thousand two hundred deep-water lengths below the surface of the universe, under a water-pressure load that exceeded ten mountain-crushing pressure, those silk slippers would have been crushed into tiny dust in the tenth of a second.
The only reason Qiao Ming stood alive upon the floor of the Genesis Well was because his feet were bare, crooked, and heavily calloused.
His soles were a body chronicle of half a century of manual labor. Decades of pacing the rough granite blocks of tidal wharves had worn his heels into broad, thick pads of dense stringy tissue that absorbed the shock of shifting stone like cured ox-hide. Years of wading through the oyster-beds of the Red Estuary had scored the margins of his arches with hundreds of tiny, white cicatrices where razor-sharp shells had cut…
